The Elementals Page 5

  Three people were dancing in the room where a fire burned in the grate. The woman had short blonde hair and wore a black velvet gown. I recognized her from the table on the street—the tarot reader. Of course, that was how I knew her voice. The woman behind the door. She was moving gracefully in the arms of two men wearing satin smoking jackets, and sharing a bottle of wine with them. One of the men had curly brown hair and the other had black hair, slicked back from his face. I recognized John Graves.

  They looked like the perfect friends I dreamed of having, I had dreamed of having since I lost the only real friend I had ever had. But I was not part of this world, I told myself. Why even try? John held the blonde as if she were his lover. They had no need for me. It was worse than the world of the dorms. At least I didn’t care if I was rejected there. So I turned away from the house where part of me still remained.

  * * *

  When I got back to my dorm room, Lauren and Dallas were gone—they must have decided to sleep in his room instead. I sat down on my bed, still out of breath from my run. There was something on my bedspread. I pulled back, my stomach turning. It couldn’t be that …

  There was a note that said, Watch how you dispose of your rag. It made us want to vomit. Love, Your Secret Admirers.

  And, yes, it was a tampon there. Apparently a used one. I picked it up with a paper towel and almost put it on Lauren’s pillow … but threw it in the trash instead.

  I’d been wrong.

  It was worse here. Treacherous beauty, even morbid beauty, was better than real-life shit.

  9. What you first fall in love with

  Before Thanksgiving my parents asked me what Bean was doing for the holiday and I knew something bad was coming by the tension in their voices.

  “Oh,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. “She’s going to be with her family. She has this huge family in Marin. I told you she’s from Marin, right? She invited me to join her if I wanted. Why?”

  My dad cleared his throat. “It’s just that, your mother isn’t feeling great. She has to go through some treatments.”

  Didn’t they want me there? I chewed at my lower lip; my mouth tasted like metal.

  “It’s really up to you,” my mother said. “We want you to know that. But I didn’t want you to see me like this, baby. I want to be stronger for you.”

  “I want to be strong for you,” I said, but I knew I wasn’t.

  “I know,” said my mom. “I know you do.”

  My dad went on. “Your mother and I do want you with us, Ariel. But when things are a little calmer so it’s easier for everyone.”

  I tried, unsuccessfully, to swallow the tinny taste away.

  “We were wondering if we could put the celebration off a little,” he said. “If you could maybe go with your friends for the holiday? Just this time.”

  I wanted to tell them I didn’t have friends, that I’d be spending the holiday looking for Jennifer Benson, but instead: “Sure,” I said. “I can see you at Christmas.” It wasn’t just a taste now; I could hear the metallic edge in my voice.

  “We’ll make it up to you, baby,” said my mom. “I promise. I’ll get well and make it up to you.”

  I wasn’t sure if this was true and even though she was still very much alive, I felt the change; a death had taken place.

  * * *

  The day was gray and bleak. The dorms were so quiet; almost everyone had left. I sat in my room reading and every now and then looking out over the empty streets. The tarot reader had said that Berkeley was built on sacred burial ground, some kind of power spot, but that day it just looked like a grim, deserted college town and when I finally went downstairs in the evening the lounge smelled like last night’s spilled beer and urine.

  I couldn’t face the pressed turkey and jellied cranberry they were serving in the dorm to the scattered few who remained. Maybe I’d take a walk outside.

  I noticed I had a text and checked the message. It was from a number I didn’t recognize.

  do u have plans 4 late txgiving dinner john graves

  My heart had never felt so full of blood. He had invited me to come to him.

  As I ran down the stairs I saw Coraline Grimm through an open door, standing on the bed in her dorm room tacking flyers on her wall.

  “I saw you at Halloween Hotel,” she said. “I’m all, that’s the girl from the dorms.”

  I made myself stop even though my body was still running downstairs. “Oh. Yeah.”

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.” She turned the rest of her body so she was facing me. Her shoulders stooped forward in her black vintage dress. “That guy you were with? I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s a heartbreaker. Literally. They all are. You should be careful.”

  “Careful how?”

  “There’s some weird shit in that drink they serve.”

  I was going to ask more but she turned back to the wall behind her and I saw what was there: missing-person flyers, including the one I had given her.

  “What’s all that?” I asked.

  “Oh. It’s a project I’m working on. It’s called Missing. Do you want to come see?”

  Fucking weird. “No thanks,” I said, more sure than ever where I wanted to go now, in spite of Coraline’s interdiction.

  * * *

  I went among the trees, up the steps, onto the porch, to the door of the house, and knocked.

  My heart beat in my mouth like a piece of hot fruit as I waited. And then the door opened.

  It wasn’t John but another young man.

  “Sorry to bother you. I’m looking for John Graves,” I said.

  He grinned so the gap between his front teeth showed. I remembered reading somewhere that a gap between the teeth signified sensuality. He was wiry and shorter than John, with curly brown hair and brown skin, light eyes. He wore a formal if slightly tattered black suit and a white dress shirt.

  “Johnny’s not back yet. Who should I say stopped by?”

  “Never mind.” I started to back away. I could hear the wispy sound of Coraline’s voice in my ear. She was probably crazy, “heartbreaker” wasn’t exactly a sinister term and I wanted whatever “weird shit” was in their wine, but Coraline seemed to know something about John Graves that I didn’t.

  “No, wait. Why don’t you come in? He’ll probably be home soon.”

  He was still grinning at me and I could smell the house behind him—that intoxicating scent from the party. Beeswax and pollen and the brew they’d served—spicy, herbal and sweet. There was also something new—the smell of food cooking—a complex blend of flavors that made my stomach cramp with hunger for the first time in weeks; food had more and more been losing its taste.

  At that moment I didn’t care that I was walking into the lair of perfect strangers. I had been here once and I wanted to return. I stepped through the door.

  It is hard to remember what you first fall in love with. Usually it is an expression in the eyes, an exchange, or a gesture or the sound of a voice, a word spoken. Those things can get blended with the atmosphere around you at the time—a fragrance in the air, a play of light, even music—so that they become almost one with each other and when you see or smell or hear the memories of a place you feel the love again, but as a pang of loss. Sometimes the feelings get connected so deeply to your body that even your own skin, your own eyes in the mirror remind you of what you no longer have. Sometimes it only takes a few things for someone to attach the way I did—enough hunger, enough loneliness, enough loss, someone who will feed you and touch you and listen. Sometimes attachment—call it love—is more complex than that. When you are in the state I was in, love can be tied up with other things, like excitement and danger and the desire to know what really happened, what actually took place.

  I walked into their house as I had walked one time before, but this time, no party. Candles were lit, as I had seen through the window, and they burned on e
very surface, dripping scented wax. I thought for a moment of fire hazards and then forgot. There were vases of roses everywhere—not the store-bought kind but wild garden roses, blousy and very sweet—I remembered stepping out into the garden behind the house: that smell. Music was playing but this time I didn’t recognize it. It was mysterious and soft with a beautiful female voice singing words I didn’t understand. Mellifluous, I thought, glad to be able to apply the word Melinda Story had used in class about Spenser’s Epithalamion. I followed the man into a large formal dining room with a long table covered in worn damask—shiny blossoms against a matte background of the same creamy color—more roses and candles and green vines. A delicately branched chandelier of white iron vines and flowers, and missing a few large crystals, hung from the ceiling. I smelled the food more strongly now and my stomach cramped again; all I’d eaten that day was a bowl of cornflakes and half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

  The woman stepped into the room through the kitchen door. She was taller than I’d realized, with broad, perfectly sculpted shoulders, long thin arms and legs and full breasts, all shown off by the red vintage Chinese silk dress she wore. She was the girl on the flyer the giant had given me. She was the girl on the bed. The tarot reader. The dancing girl.

  She looked me up and down. “We’ve met before.”

  “On Telegraph. I’m Ariel.”

  “Like The Tempest.” It gave me a queer feeling when she said that; I didn’t understand until I realized that it was exactly what John Graves had said. She took my hand. Her skin was hot.

  “I’m Tania.”

  “Hi.”

  “De la Torre.” She looked over at the man in the suit. “She just appeared at the door?”

  “She came looking for John.”

  “He invited me,” I said, wanting to check the text to make sure I hadn’t imagined it.

  Tania nodded. “So you met Perry?”

  I waved lamely at both of them and tried to smile. I steadied myself by holding onto one of the dining room chairs. It had a wooden back carved with flowers and vines and was upholstered in faded green velvet.

  “You can join us for dinner,” Tania said softly. Her voice was almost as compelling as the smell of the food. “But you have to dress for it.” She scowled at my clothes. “Come on.”

  She gestured for me to follow her up the stairs. Perry came behind us.

  The bedroom was lushly, if a bit shabbily, decorated with a large bed draped in red silk velvet and threadbare Persian rugs on the floor. There was a dressing table and Tania motioned for me to sit. She handed me a cup full of the thick, dark liquid I’d had at the party. I took it, trying not to seem too eager. I’d thought about that drink a lot since Halloween.

  “Makeover!” Perry said. I looked at myself in the mirror. My hair was limp and scraggly and my skin so pale you could see a vein running blue under the surface of my cheek. I looked like any exhausted freshman but in contrast to the two people in the room with me I was ridiculous.

  “What will we do with this?” Tania took my hair out of the ponytail I always wore and ran her fingers through it. The touch soothed me and I closed my eyes for a second, remembering how John had taken my hand at the concert. I surrendered as she expertly trimmed the split ends, feeling suddenly like a little girl, curious and trusting, not reckless, not suspicious anymore.

  I hadn’t had a haircut since the summer. My mom used to cut my hair at home, in the bathroom with a towel over my shoulders and the smell of her so close to my face. But I didn’t want to think about her now. I reached up and flicked a tear away. If they noticed they didn’t say anything. My hair fluttered around me; it was down to my waist, even trimmed.

  “Beautiful,” said Tania. “Now makeup!”

  She wiped my face off with a cleansing pad and then applied a serum, lotion, an eye cream. After that I felt Perry’s hands, both thumbnails painted with grass-green polish, flicker over my face, so light it almost didn’t seem like he was touching me with anything at all. While he worked he commented on my eyes (“So big and green!”), my eyelashes (“Are they real?”) and my facial structure (“Nice bones.”). It wasn’t that I hadn’t been told I was pretty before but being pretty made me feel vulnerable, like Jeni, like someone who could be hurt. I usually wanted to seem as plain as possible, but not that night. They had turned me away from the mirror. Tania came toward me holding a dress.

  “Perfect, baby!” Perry clapped his hands. “Exactly right!”

  It was a long pale blue satin dress, cut on the bias, as Tania pointed out. It looked like the slip that went under a vintage gown. I was glad I’d shaved my legs that morning. Tania put her hands on my waist and gently pulled my T-shirt over my head. I let her. It was weird in contrast to how I usually felt; I wasn’t embarrassed at all. Part of me wanted her to see my breasts. She unhooked my bra, removed it and tossed it on the ground, then slipped the dress over my head.

  “Shoes.” Perry was holding a pair of silver high-heeled sandals with an expression on his face somewhere between fetishist and shoe salesman. I stepped into them and he knelt and fastened the straps.

  Then Tania opened a blue velvet jewelry box and took out a necklace of pale blue and white gemstones and freshwater pearls. It shone in the soft light, iridescent. She put it on me and it lay there, cool against my collarbone. She sprayed some perfume onto my neck. It smelled like the jasmine that grew in my mother’s garden, and like something else, like smoke and wind and what jewels would smell like ground up, pulverized into scent. Tania sprayed my right wrist, then paused at my left, fingering the beads that spelled Jeni’s name but not asking. After a moment she sprayed the perfume there as well.

  “Now you’re ready,” she said.

  I looked at myself in the mirror. I smiled shyly at the girl there.

  “Sylph,” said Tania. “That’s your new name.”

  “I’m starved!” said Perry. “And you are, too, I bet, Miss.” He gently circled my left wrist with his thumb and forefinger just below the bracelet. “Look at the size of that! We must fatten you.”

  There was butternut squash soup in a silver tureen—the best I’d ever tasted. There was a wild rice dish made with almonds and cranberries, a green salad with beets and goat cheese, homemade bread and butter and more of the warm red brew that they’d served at the party. For dessert there was a caramel apple tartin with homemade vanilla-bean ice cream. I ate in a kind of stupor, consuming the food as if I’d never had taste buds before. While we ate they asked me questions about my life and I answered in between mouthfuls. I told them that I was from L.A., that both my parents were English teachers—that was why I was named after a character in a Shakespearean play—that my dad taught at the university, my mom at the high school where I used to go. I had grown up doing ballet, reading. I said that I was an English major, that I wanted to write someday, that I read the way other people ate chocolate. There wasn’t that much to tell about myself, I realized; I hadn’t had enough life experience to say anything interesting. That is, if I left out Jeni and my mom’s cancer, which I did. I had spent three months showing everyone Jeni’s picture, waiting for opportunities to talk about her. Now, even with the opportunity the bracelet provided and the fact that Tania had read or guessed about a loss from my past, I didn’t want to.

  But it was a relief to talk about other things, to have people listen attentively, especially such glamorous, gorgeous ones, the kind who, in my real life, had never paid attention to me before. I forgot that I had ever felt any suspicion about John. They laughed and refilled my glass and they watched me—Perry and Tania—as if I were the most important person in the world.

  “What sign are you, Sylph?” she asked. “Wait, don’t tell me.”

  “She always gets it right,” Perry warned.

  “I have to eliminate first.” She hardly paused. “You’re not a Taurus, Capricorn or Virgo.”

  I nodded. “How’d you—”

  She held up her hand. “Not Aries, Leo
or Sagittarius. And you’re not Pisces.” She and Perry rolled their eyes at each other. “Or Scorpio or Cancer, although you’re in your shell a little, like a Cancer.”

  I tensed reflexively at the word.

  Tania went on. “I’d say, either Libra, Gemini or Aquarius. Am I right?”

  I nodded again and took another sip of my drink. “Libra,” said Tania.

  “How’d you know?”

  “Air, you’re all air.”

  “And what about you guys?”

  “We’re easy as pie to read.” Perry grinned. His features were modelesque but also the definition of impish. “I’m Capricorn, goat boy. I always know what’s right for you. Tania’s the big mean lioness Leo. And John’s a …

  “Pisces, that bastard,” they said together and laughed.

  “Pisces is the oldest sign,” Tania explained. Sort of explained. I didn’t know much about astrology except for the horoscopes Jeni and I read in magazines; she was a Sagittarius who loved animals and travel. “With a Scorpio moon!” Tania added. “Thinks he knows everything.”

  “As opposed to me, who actually does.” Perry winked.

  “You’re perfect for us,” Tania said.

  “What about you?” I said, finally, flushed and a little breathless. “Besides the astrology. Who are you all anyway?” Then we all started to laugh.

  It seemed funny at the time but I can’t understand it now except to say I was drunk, but we laughed and kept laughing, doubled over and clutching our abdomens.

  “I have no idea,” said Perry with a last snort. He blotted his tearing eyes with his linen napkin.

  “Seriously.”

  “Like what about us? Our racial background? Our jobs?”

  “All of the above?”

  “We’re racial mutts. Between the three of us I think we cover all of Europe, most of Asia and part of South America and Africa.”